I’m an 80-year-old man and have just written a psychologically based book entitled: What Would Our Founding Fathers Say?: How Today’s Leaders Have Lost Their Way. One of the primary reasons I wrote the book was because for many years now, and with increasing frequency, our integrity as a nation has been severely abused. It has been battered by our politicians – our elected officials. Of late, they have shown their true, self-serving colors by aligning themselves to their political party, failing to serve their constituents through accordance with Constitution that they swore to serve and protect. In short, they choose to serve themselves instead.

I mention my age because I no longer feel as proud of my country as I felt growing up. Over the course of the past few decades, with a fair degree of consistency, our elected officials have either refused to hear or have chosen to ignore what “We the People” wanted them to do. How did they ignore the will of the people? Consider the Vietnam conflict: the men eligible for the draft clearly expressed their displeasure of going to war with Vietnam by vociferously demonstrating against it. We lost the way and paid the price of 58,209 lost lives of military personnel.

The most recent example of abusing our nations integrity is the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, at Newtown, Connecticut. Twenty children and six adults were tragically killed by a crazed gunman. This is a tragedy of unspeakable proportions that perhaps could have been prevented if we more fully understood the reasons why our Founding Fathers had written the Second Amendment. When we take the time to examine their intended meaning, we will recognize that the Right to Bear Arms amendment needs to be changed to more accurately reflect our society today.

The Second Amendment states “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” On the surface, that looks rather innocuous and inoffensive. Prior to the Revolutionary War, our fledging country had no standing militia and had to rely on our “citizen soldiers” or “minute men,” to come together and join forces to fight the British in the Revolutionary War. After the war, the militia was disbanded. Since the Second Amendment was written after the Revolutionary War, when the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were written, our nation had no standing army. The Constitutional delegates altered the language of the Second Amendment several times to emphasize the military context of the amendment and the role of the militia as a force to defend national sovereignty, quell insurrection, and protect against tyranny.

In short, just because the Founding Fathers wrote the Second Amendment into the Bill of Rights doesn’t necessarily make it right for our time, here in the 21st century.

Obviously, we can’t require the owners of some estimates of, 250 million hand guns, rifles and semi-automatic weapons to relinquish their firearms. But what we can do is to not continue to politicize “gun control,” issues. Instead, we need to encourage our politicians to discuss what’s best for ALL Americans and not just the special interests groups and lobbyists who may be in favor of the existing law.

What would help us set the right tone for the gun control debate is to recall President Abraham Lincoln’s famous statement that we must appeal to the “better angels of our nature,” when we engage in that debate .

Upon entering office, since Congress and the president promise to serve the people through the Constitution that they swore to serve and protect, we’re hardly protecting every American’s life by allowing the existing Second Amendment to remain unchallenged today.

This is the time for us all to contact our Congressional Representatives and demand we take another hard look at the existing Second Amendment so that we can help restore our national integrity and begin to say, “I’m proud to be an American.”